#projectkowhai

Inventory System

Based on UMG tutorials. I’ve learnt a better understanding of blueprints and their interaction with each other as well as an understanding of Widgets for UI.

This system is flexible allowing different pickup items to be made and modified easily. I’ve implemented a simple food pickup for the prototype that can be stored and eaten at any time. Additionally, this inventory system allows for interaction with other actors. What this means is that I could easily make a campfire that can be spawn by the player anywhere. 

The campfire is a collection of a few logs underneath a fire particle effect. Accompanying that is a point light that I’ve learnt how to animate both movement and brightness to simulate “flickering”. To finish it off is a HRTF speaker to play the fire sound effect. I’m quite proud of this simply because of how fast and easy yet quite effective it was.

The inventory system itself is quite a task and to be honest I think I only understand 80% of it currently, will have to reverse engineer later on.

Yesterday we set up our game for assessment. The end of semester four has arrived and we are getting this project marked on various points by the lecturers in BCT.

On Monday morning I got up early and arrived in studio to a bombsite. It was a complete mess everywhere with students rushing around getting their projects up and running for assessment at midday. We had most of the necessary parts already there and as more team members arrived we worked on getting things like the large TV display in place and decorated. As we had no wall we had to hang our posters from the display which I think is a bit tacky but it was our only solution as the pedestal we reserved never arrived. The business cards were printed nicely and we got heaps but the design includes no contact details. This was a very big mistake as they are basically glorified PostIt notes now.

Others were working on packaging the game and getting it up and running on the laptop. I basically went between everyone and helped where I could. We were working right up to the end in a very stressful final sprint to get the game working. Eventually we did with not a moment to spare.

We then had lunch and celebrated for the rest of the day and (some of us) into the night. Here at Project Kowhai we work hard and play hard.

To quote the end of my conceptual statement:

Overall I am happy with the game. There a few things we wanted to do if we had more time and skill such as animals, a few more mechanics, a larger map and true photogrammetry assets and environments. I have been able to learn a lot about Unreal Engine and partial open world level design as well as specific things like material and tech art visual scripting and particle effect manipulation. The most significant thing I have gotten out of this project however is my experience of leading this team. My skills as a people manager have grown significantly and I have been exposed to a more corporate business focused aspect of game design which can often be overlooked. It has also made me familiar with all the different sub skills and responsivities within the team on a broad strokes, holistic level. 

This has been a great project with and even better team. 10/10 would game develop again.

So short I don’t even need to compress the blog display length.

Tuesday

Fine tooth combed the level pulling trees down to the landscape and painting more landscape texture. Added some tree variety to the end tp zones.

Thursday

Implemented the picnic table at tp zone 8 or 9. The large open plain area. I had to invert the roughness with a 1- node on it's materials. I placed it beside the large field rocks. I then added a beer bottle and a tin of beans. I also added a radio that was recently modelled.

Garian added more noises.

Nathan tweeked some mechanics.

Zav and I printed a test A3 of the art poster. It has some printing lines but it was a good test.

As the dates draw near, we had a lot of talks about planning and what to do. Up to now, our planning has been solely focused on showcase but we can’t ignore the importance of the assessment. After all, it’s our grades. But I sense that the team has lost the bigger picture in focusing on assessment. It’s not entirely new, college essentially taught all of us that meeting the criteria was all you need and anything beyond that was just a waste of energy. But we are now in Uni.

The main point of difference here is the ability to teleport in the game. I initially provided this feature solely for development purposes as the map was huge and difficult to reach far areas to test solely by walking. This feature then went on to be used during GDM to showcase the environment as the actual gameplay and mechanics were still being developed. But as time went on, I personally felt as if the feature was being misused and wholly out of place for the game. Additionally, as time went on, the teleport locations went up to 8. Now, as the dates draw near, most of the team want to keep it in.

From my point of view, the teleportation takes away a major aspect of our project and changes the way people perceive it. Perhaps we were having different visions of the project all along and never really consolidated. Our project at its core was all about being lost, exploring, and experiencing. To me, allowing the player to teleport around made the game just one glorified slideshow and a cheap attempt to “show off” the “good parts” of our game. I hate to say it but it’s almost like “whoring out” the game, using its visual appeal and stripping away its actual value. Having 8 possible teleport locations meant that alot of work had to be done to make each area good and unique, as only the first 3 were of decent developed state, something I thought would meant a lot of work for our landscaper, Nathan. Personally I thought it would be logical to pour all our attention into the starting area to make it really good and even pull things from other areas into the starting area to demo here and there. From the start, my emphasis was making the starting area representative of the game, looks, atmosphere, interactivity and exploration. However Nathan kept developing new areas, spreading his work over a large area. Just for example, each area has to be constantly checked of floating trees, a problem with our foliage and landscape. Nathan has to check carefully and manually drag each one down to the ground. A slow but admirable process. But with 8 teleport locations, he is essentially multiplying his workload by 8, something that just doesn’t seem logical. And that’s just trees.

If I’m being brutally honest, more than half of the teleport locations are not that great. Some of them feature a single thing like for example the loghut. But otherwise they all look essentially the same due to the same trees. After the third teleport, I personally think that the teleport locations have no exploration value and players are going to get hopelessly bored or lost.

The underlying reason for this decision, from what I understand was primarily aimed at allowing Ben, our lecturer, to explore all the areas. This immediately rings alarm bells for me, as whenever people aim their projects specifically for their lecturer or whatever, they are ignoring the many others that will see the project. If we are just going for marks, why bother being at the showcase? Ben was and is not our “client” so to speak.

This week was when my group moved into the corner with Project Limbus. I also completely broke the project and had everyone very worried until the other Nathan fixed it.

Went to a comunity event and saw a cool movie.

The first thing that probably comes to mind is words, but that’s not the only way to tell a story. Especially in video games, words is a big no no. Let me repeat that, DONT DO IT. I cannot count the amount of times I have been turned off by games that had excruciating amounts of reading or talking. As a simple tip I learnt for story writing, don’t you dare dump exposition. Players/readers are starting their foray into your world, lure them with small but attractive points and don’t scare them off. 

There are other ways of telling a story in game other than reading and dialogue. Flashbacks/somehow-dream-but-reality scenes are the second commonly used in games. For me the best stories are the ones I see in action and ones I find. For example, I learn better about a character by seeing them in action, how they speak, how they interact and so on. Instead of telling me they are loyal or evil, show me that they are. In terms of stories I find, Bethesda does this well especially in Fallout.

In a post-apocalyptic world, my initial curiosity is who lived here? What lives did they live? Was everything as great as it seems?

Bethesda leaves many props about abandon places that seem random but once you look at them carefully, all the pieces fall into place. Something as simple as bottles of alcohol next to a skeleton tells you that this person drank as much as he could when the bombs dropped. Or, more complex, clues to an underground scheme for a seemingly innocent town will lead you to bountiful loot.

I intend to use this technique for our game and my future games. For our current game, the main character came with a group of “friends” into the bush and had a great time involving lots of alcohol. The players starts the game waking up in a cave not knowing this, so to fill him in on the backstory I plan to put simple empty beer bottles around a smoky campfire to tell part of the story. Additionally, the player also has a phone (hopefully), and by using the history of message exchange, the player can fill in the rest of the story.

At this point, I’ve deemed the radial menu a lost cause due to the shallow value of it versus the amount of work needed. So I’m now working on interactivity with the “fire”.

In the game, I hope to give the fire more importance rather than just warmth and, light sure. I’m taking inspiration from games particularly “The Long Dark” where the player can fuel the fire to extend its life, cook food and boil water. This might prove tricky as I will have to facilitate an exchange of information between my inventory system to this new system as well as starting the first phase of replacing overlaps with line trace interaction.